Harry Potter's Great British Thespians
Helena Bonham Carter as Bellatrix Lestrange, 5-8
A star at 19 in her first feature, A Room With a View, this descent of the British aristocracy, and great-niece of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, might have been typecast playing titled ingénues (the girl queen in Lady Jane, Ophelia to Mel Gibson's Hamlet). But Bonham Carter, 44, had a wilder streak, which she sported as the Xanax-addicted Maria in Fight Club and the conniving Kate Cloy in the 1997 adaptation of Henry James The Wings of the Dove. The poisonous flower in Bonham Carter came to full bloom in two roles for her husband, director Tim Burton — as the misanthropic baker of human meat pies in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and the screaming Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland. Her Bellatrix is woven of this same dense cloth: calculating, castrating, a monarch of sick mischief. See, she's still playing royalty.